Eight sources on the wiki and five studies on notes, read one by one. What they say, and what changes for you.
You have hundreds of notes and no way to find the thread again. Since April 2026 the answer has a name: instead of rummaging through your notes at every question, you let a model write a wiki and keep it current. Here are the sources that told the story, with a comment of our own and, at the end of each entry, what changes if you use wordspace.
No excerpts and no long quotes: the links go to the original, which is where it should be read. · Reviewed: 10 · 2026
GitHub Gist4 · 2026Andrej Karpathy
Stop redoing the same work at every question. The model compiles a wiki of markdown files once: the pages cite each other and get richer with every new source. You choose what to feed it and what to ask; the repetitive work goes to the machine.
wordspace does it without you assembling anything: the wiki grows from your notes as you write, and the model runs on your Mac.
Analytics Vidhya4 · 2026Riya Bansal
Searching starts from zero at every question. A wiki accumulates. The difference shows when you ask something that lives in five different notes: the first way struggles, the second has already done the work.
That's why wordspace updates the wiki when you save, not when you ask.
AI Maker4 · 2026Wyndo
Someone took the idea and ran it over their own Obsidian vault with an agent: it reads, writes the pages, draws the links. The vault organises itself. The pattern isn't tied to one program.
If your archive is already in Obsidian, the syntax is the same: what you write here is markdown, not an invented format.
DEV Community4 · 2026Kunal
An honest report, with the real obstacles: compiling on macOS, preparing the data, a machine brought to its knees. The conclusion is that privacy is paid for in hours of work.
Those are the hours an installed app saves you: here you pick the models from a list, and the numbers are measured on your Mac, not promised.
GitHub Gist8 · 2026Rohit Ghumare
Someone who kept a wiki like this running for months names its weak spot: it treats everything written as valid forever. The proposal is to weight claims by how many sources back them, and have new information explicitly supersede the old while keeping the history.
The problem applies here too: which is why the wiki isn't a deposit that only grows, but is rebuilt from your notes when the notes change.
PromptQuorum8 · 2026Hans Kuepper
A checklist that dismantles a comfortable assumption. Keeping the model on your machine avoids sending your questions to someone else's servers, but it says nothing about the program's telemetry, nor about model files downloaded from anywhere, nor about an interface left open on the network. Design as though the model were already compromised.
It applies to us too: “it runs on your Mac” is a promise to be checked, not believed. The questions on this list are the right ones to put to us.
arXiv4 · 2026Stefan Miteski
What goes wrong when a knowledge base has a single reader: the most-cited pages become the dominant version, and evidence that contradicts them struggles to get in. The author proposes triage, decay and audit, so that contradiction has a route all the way through.
wordspace keeps the link between every claim and the note it came from, so the comparison can always be redone. The objection still stands.
Forte Labs11 · 2023Tiago Forte
Forte tries the generation of apps meant to replace Evernote and turns each one down: too much technique, too much terminology, too slow. The observation cuts against us too, which is why it's here.
How we try not to fall into it: no folders to invent, no system to learn. Capture, and decide later.
Before the LLM wiki there is a forty-year-old problem: we take notes in a hurry and then can't find them. Researchers in personal information management have been measuring it ever since. Five studies, and what wordspace takes from them.
Scientific Reports10 · 2015Benn, Bergman et al.
Seventeen people look for their own files inside an MRI scanner. Opening one folder after another activates the brain areas we use to find our way in space; searching with a word activates a language area instead. It is one possible explanation for something other studies have measured for years: even with better search, people keep preferring the familiar path.
Every theme and every person has a fixed page in the wiki, and from a page you move to the notes it cites and to nearby pages, not only by searching. What it doesn't do: you didn't build this structure, and it changes when your notes change, so it becomes familiar with use, not straight away.
ACM CHI 20115 · 2011Whittaker et al.
345 people, more than 85,000 attempts to find an email again. Those who build elaborate folders really do use them to refind, but they don't find more than anyone else and they take longer; search and messages grouped by conversation work better. The study is about email: that it holds for notes too is a step we take ourselves.
wordspace doesn't ask you for folders: groupings grow out of what you write, with #tags, @people and themes, and ⌘F searches notes and wiki together. If you're attached to your own folders, you won't find them here.
ACM CHI 20094 · 2009Van Kleek et al.
Ten days of real notes in a bare-bones notepad. Half the notes are written in ten seconds or less, the typical note is seven words long, three in four are never edited again and only a little over one in four gets deleted. The rest piles up as it is: abbreviated, without context, written for a future self who meanwhile forgets.
Nobody goes back to tidy up, which is why the wiki rereads your notes for you and every page points back to the note it came from. What it doesn't do: a five-word note stays five words long, and the wiki can link it, not remember what you meant.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems9 · 2008Bernstein, Van Kleek, Karger, schraefel
Post-its, emails to yourself, untitled text files: the authors gather them from 27 people in five organisations and count more than 125 kinds of information. The reason they stay outside our programs is almost always the same: when you write, you have no time to decide where it goes, and the tool asks you. Their advice: let people capture at once and postpone the decisions.
That's the Inbox rule: on the iPhone or the Mac you type or dictate with no title and no folder, and decide when you have time. Paper scraps stay outside, though: we don't reach them.
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems1 · 1983Thomas W. Malone
Malone walks into the offices of ten people and looks at how they keep their papers. Two observations still hold: the pile on the desk isn't laziness, it reminds you what needs doing; and the real obstacle to order is the effort of deciding which category something belongs to. His advice to designers: let untitled piles exist, and classify automatically whatever can be classified.
The Inbox is the untitled pile: what you haven't decided yet stays there, and the wiki groups your notes by theme without asking you for a category. What it doesn't do: you see the pile on your desk as you walk past, while the Inbox only reminds you when you open it.
Four objections that come from the reading above. Three of them are about us too, and that's what the “what it doesn't do” line is for: without it, this section would be advertising.
Raised by: Rohit Ghumare
What wordspace does. The wiki is rebuilt from your notes: correct a note and the page citing it changes with it. There's no parallel archive to keep aligned by hand.
What it doesn't do. We don't track what superseded what. If you change your mind, the new page doesn't say there was an old one, or why it fell.
Raised by: Stefan Miteski, arXiv
What wordspace does. Contradictions are a feature, not an accident: the app looks for the places where you contradicted yourself and puts them in front of you, with the two notes that don't add up. Answering creates a note of your own, not an automatic correction.
What it doesn't do. Nothing against weight: a theme you've written about a lot counts for more than one barely mentioned, and the wiki doesn't correct that.
Raised by: Hans Kuepper
What wordspace does. No telemetry, no analytics service, no account of ours. The app's code goes online only when you import a link yourself and, if you use it, for iCloud: the channel between iPhone and Mac and the sync between your Macs go through your account, never through a server of ours.
What it doesn't do. The models are downloaded from the internet the first time, and that download goes through Apple's and MLX's libraries: there, the network is theirs, not ours. And if you use iCloud, you are trusting Apple too.
Raised by: Tiago Forte
What wordspace does. No folders to invent, no method to learn, no required fields. The Inbox exists to postpone the decision until you have time, which is when decisions get made well.
What it doesn't do. On first launch you pick a model profile, and that is a technical decision we ask of you anyway. We've cut it down to three cards with measured numbers, but it's still a question before you start.
wordspace